By knowing what you want to achieve, you’ll know where you have to concentrate your efforts. By measuring your progress you’ll know whether your plan is working and how close you are to reaching your goal.

To improve your health you need to set goals and then work towards them. Otherwise, nothing will change. This process begins by creating the ‘big picture’ of what you want to make happen.

Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to feel better and have more energy? Do you want to look better to the opposite sex?  Define clearly what it is you want and how you’ll be able to measure how close you are to achieving it.

If the big picture goal is to ‘have more energy’, define how you’d measure the increase in your energy levels: “Be able to walk 10km without resting by June 30”.  If your big picture goal is to lower your blood pressure you might say: “Be 120 over 70 with a pulse rate of 65 by March 15”.

Once you have your big picture goal you work out how you’re going to progress towards it. This is best done in milestones or steps, breaking down the big goal into a series of smaller interim goals. 

For example, if the big picture goal is to lose 20kg in ten weeks the steps could be expressed as: “lose 2kg in two weeks, 5kg in five weeks, 8kg in eight weeks, and 10kg in ten weeks.”

Next, outline how you’re going to achieve your goal by creating a series of actions that relate to each step in the plan. Weight loss generally involves a combination of diet and exercise, so the actions you can take to achieve your goal will relate to the types and quantities of foods you’ll consume and the exercise you’ll do.

Monitoring and measuring are crucial to reaching the health goals you’ve set. Keep a notebook that restates your big picture goal and the milestones that you’ll reach while achieving it. Keep a record of the actions you take and what they achieve.

If at any milestone you haven’t achieved an interim goal you’ll need to modify your overall plan to get it back on track. If experience shows an interim goal was unrealistic, don’t worry. The ‘big picture’ goal is the one you’re after so keep at it until you get there.